Without wishing to pour too much salt into the wound, isn’t it just a little ironic that, while for the first time ever an American aircraft carrier has been named after a living president, he isn’t going to be in attendance for it’s launch?
Too effing bad Ronnie is so brain dead that his wife will christen the ship instead. This may sound a bit vindictive, but I have yet to see any sound refutation of Reagan’s participation in (or responsibility for) interfering with the Iranian hostage release. Challenger catastrophe aside, the hostage meddling is enough to d@mn him to eternal Hell. Ronnie and his cronies usurped the American political process and did so with full knowledge of the treasonous aspect involved.
Wrapping yourself in the flag does not absolve one for defecating upon the constitution.
cmkeller-Did I say the Sandinistas were angels? No, they weren’t. But how does that justify aiding the contras, who were just as bad? It’s like giving support to the Nazis over the Bolsheviks, or vice-versa. Reagan kept saying the contras were fighting for democracy. My ass.
They were out killing innocent peasants to terrorize the countryside. But I guess that’s okay, since they weren’t communists.
Err, 1984, not 1985. Considering the trauma the country went through under Somoza, the Sandinistas were pretty benign in comparison. Especially when you consider they were being attacked by a well-funded and -equipped proxy army. The fact that they pursued socialistic policies such as (sorely needed) land reform was what Reagan, et al found truly unforgivable.
It’s the 18% that do who curdle my blood. No, that’s not true. I’m willing to believe that many of those who think so highly of him are simply uninformed.
I guess it’s the unrepentant apologists for Raygun that curdle my blood, the ones who rationalize his every dastardly act as if it either didn’t happen or by golly isn’t actually a crime against humanity. And I guess it’s people who think illicit sex is worse than murder and treason who curdle my blood.
That’s not what my World Almanac says. Looks to me like the Sandanistas came to power through kidnapping and assassination.
Kawliga:
My error. Nonetheless, he never did have the House.
Guinastasia:
It does if the Sandanistas were Soviet-backed and were instigating communist guerillas in El Salvador. Just how close should the Soviets and their proxies have gotten to the border of the U. S. before we took some action?
Sorry, I was in El Salvador in the mid-80’s and anyone who claims we thought of it as any kind of threat to the US (I don’t mean you, CMK, I question your sources) is either lying through their teeth, or smokes crack. The violent, senseless rule of the Fourteen Families got old, finally, and the people revolted, plain and simple. Instead of throwing tea in a harbor, they burned coffee plantations. Instead of tossing out an onerous “foreign” power, it was an attempt to overthrow an internal one. And where the US rebels got their funding from trade over which they had some control, and from the French - the peasants in ES had not much recourse but to get $$ and materiel from wherever they could. Little bastards couldn’t even spell “Das Kapital”, and were under much more evil oppression than the early colonial patriots.
Truly, we supported the right wing as much to preserve our “patent” on democratic revolutions as anything else (such as a proving ground for weapons testing leading to arms sales, the equivalent of the test-drive at your neighborhood car dealer), but it didn’t include fear of communist invasion. Not even US embassy personnel, or even the kind folks at the NSC and the DOD who thought up that canard ever believed that one - only Ronnie Raygun, and the nice taxpayers who wanted to believe the press releases and doddering old fools like Helms on faith.
I’d like to thank you for your first-person perspective on that El Salvador issue.
However, I don’t think Americans saw the El Salvadoran guerillas themselves as the inherent threat. They saw the leftist guerillas supported by Soviets, who were themselves the threat. The El Salvadorans may indeed have been as ignorant as you say, but even if they were complete dupes, having a Soviet power base just one country removed from the U.S…and would Mexico really have been that difficult for the Soviets to get their hooks into, if the U.S. had been strictly non-interventionalist?..that was indeed a threat.
cmkeller-would you PLEASE give me a reliable source stating that the Sandinistas were backed by the USSR? Not every communist country was or is backed by the Soviets. Yugoslavia under Tito comes to mind.
And even then, how does that justify the murder of innocents? Is that not merely choosing between one evil and another? We were simply setting the people up for more misery?
Remember-the USSR had problems of its own at that time. Contrary to popular misconception-not ALL of the Soviets were evil. Certainly Lenin and Stalin and quite a few others were vile, cruel dictators. And certainly the system of the Soviet Union was cruel. BUT…why does that make it okay to back the “Soviet’s” enemy, if they are just as cruel, if not worse?
Again-please site me a source that the Sandinistas were specifically backed, supported and engineered by the Bolshies.
And while we’re at it, how many of these insurgent movements calling themselves Communists really were?
And how many took on the name primarily as a way to tell their people that they weren’t controlled or influenced by los Yanquis, in comparison to the local dictators and ruling classes etc.?
I’ve never looked into the details of any such movement even casually without having to conclude that the single prism of anti-Communism that the hard-right uses to see them was hopelessly unrealistic to the point of counterproductivity.
Yugoslavia was actually unique in its independence; every other communist country was, before the collapse of the Soviet Union, backed either by them or by China.
Nicaragua’s communists, and the leftist guerillas in El Salvador that they were backing, were definitely supported by Cuba, which was unquestionably a Soviet-supported state.
It does not justify the murder of innocents. However, sometimes it is necessary to choose between evils. It’s not a pretty choice, but sometimes it has to be done.
If the Soviets had managed to take Nicaragua and El Salvador without U.S. resistance, what would have stopped them from going into Mexico (possibly Guatemala first)? Would it not be very much against U.S. interests to have even a communist guerilla war in Mexico, much less a Soviet-backed communist government if it succeeded?
Brezhnev, who was premier of the USSR when Reagan was elected, was cut from the same cloth…just ask the fine folks in Afghanistan.
See above, re: Mexico.
ElvisL1ves:
That’s a fair question, but somewhat irrelevant. If they were backed by the Soviets, then that gave the Soviets de facto control of that country, whether or not they seriously hewed to Communist ideology. They might not know Marx, but they knew where their guns were coming from, and how fast they’d disappear if they stopped doing their leftist-revolution thing.
Counterproductive? Not if the goal was to bring down the Soviet Union. To that end, it produced quite handsomely.
So, in other words, the USSR only indirectly supported the Sandinistas because the USSR supported Cuba, which supported the Commies in Nicaragua…okay.
deep breaths…
Okay, at that time, was the US not negotiating with Gorbachev, who wanted peace and prosperity for his own country? Or rather, Gorbachev was trying to argue for nuclear freeze, which Reagan denounced as a commie/evil empire thing?
And in essence, is not Afghanistan today much much much worse off than when the Soviets were there? (not that I support the Soviets, mind you, just asking a question.)
I don’t get it, no one seems to understand that communism in Latin America was a different situation. Communism does not necessarily mean dictator/tyrant/USSR, etc etc. What about Salvador Allende in Chile? HE was a communist-does that mean we should have kicked him out?
cmkeller-have you even read some of the documents concerning the School of the Americas?
shaking head in amazement I know I’m going to hit Godwin’s Law here, but let me just ask-one sometimes wonders that if Hitler had come up later, during Reagan’s time, would he have been seen as such a monster-after all, he wasn’t communist? Just curious, because at times, the US supported people NO BETTER THAN HITLER, all because they were NOT COMMUNIST. THAT is a scary thought.
So you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, huh? Fella name o’ Uncle Joe used to say that, too. Except we reviled him for it.
Oh yeah, I remember Reagan expressing alarm that the Sandinistas were only 2 days’ drive away by tank from Brownsville, Texas. That was as snickerworthy a fantasy then as it is now.
To the same degree the US “controls” every country IT sends money too, I presume? Too many counterexamples to list.
Not to get into the argument that Communism, whatever it was, was rotten to the core and falling on its own, but does the effect on the people of these affected countries enter into your calculations? What do they think of us now?
Sure, the few in the ruling classes who played us for suckers, collecting all that foreign aid money and sending it to Switzerland until they got overthrown by their own people, know what they owe. Yes, the rebel movement that accepted Soviet aid were playing those guys, too, out of obvious opportunism.
But would the great majority who saw themselves oppressed with the help of Yanqui dollars and guns think the US was on the side of democracy? If they overthrew the dictators we supported, aren’t they entitled to think they gained democracy by their own efforts and that the US actually opposed it? Why shouldn’t they simply hate us and all we stand for?
THAT’s what I meant by “counterproductive”. Now, please explain in a little more detail exactly what it is that you think we’ve “won” there.
That’s hardly “indirect.” Cuba was a satellite state of the USSR as much as Poland and East Germany were.
Sure he was. I think it was the late Yitzhak Rabin who pointed out that it’s always your enemies that you negotiate with. Nonetheless, they were still our enemies.
Hell yes, Reagan was suspicious of that. In case you’ve forgotten, they had about ten times as many nnukes as we did. Agree to a freeze, and they have the upper hand.
Not that your skepticism about Reagan is unjustified, but why the heck do you seem to have so much less skepticism regarding Gorbachev? The man was a dictator, for crying out loud. He sent tanks into Lithuania and Latvia to prevent their secession from the USSR (before it eventually decided to give up being a Union). What saves Gorbachev from the cynical eye with which you view Reagan?
Yes…but it’s not better off than it was before the Soviets became involved.
Maybe not in theory, but it has ended up being so in practice.
Chile is a bit beyond my knowledge, so I’ll have to do some more reading before I could intelligently answer that question. But was that Reagan’s doing, or was it pre-Reagan?
Quite frankly, considering the fact that Reagan quite happily dropped bombs on Libya for their support of terrorism, I’d say that anti-communism was not Reagan’s only criterion for evaluating threats.
It would be a scary thought if true, but quite frankly, to say this seriously minimizes Hitler’s crimes. Hitler was more than just a mass-murderering dictator, he was a would-be world conqueror with a comprehensive genocide program. Strongmen who just want to maintain control over their own countries are indeed monsters, but let’s be careful with our analogies. There are possibly a few folks who could be mentioned in the same breath as Hitler…maybe Stalin and Pol Pot…but any others were strictly minor league.
ElvisL1ves:
We reviled him for playing fast and loose with the lives of American citizens. Foreign policy has a completely different set of standards.
An exaggeration, perhaps, but if left unchecked, it could have become a reality easily enough.
Why do you think that the vigorous fight against the Communists who weren’t yet near our borders had nothing to do with the fact that they ended up not getting near our borders?
I’d say that the folks in Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and East Germany think pretty highly of us, and a few other of the Soviet satellite states or former republics as well. Granted, Russia itself has a ways to go before it enjoys the result, but Russia, having once been top dog on its block, has a bit of a different attitude, and is therefore a unique situation. The election of Violetta Chamorro in Nicaragua’s first monitored elections seems to indicate that in that country as well, the attitude of the people is, if not thankful to the Americans, at least understood the advantages of not having the Sandanistas in charge.
But was it worth it to sell arms to a country which has declared war against you and then take those illicit profits and use them to fund a group of rebels already deemed so repulsive that the President was explicitly forbidden by Federal statute to support?
CMK, you’ve got to wake up and smell the coffee, here. Iran-Contra was one of the most repugnant, cynical, and dangerous acts of the past century. My goddamned President subverted the very Constitution itself in order to fund a gang of thugs who were explicitly prohibited from being supported. There is nothing noble, democratic, or legal about the entire situation, and to claim that such a measure was righteous or even justified undermines the most basic premises that our country is founded upon.
I don’t elect a damned king every four years, and that stupid bastard was supposed to know that. Instead, he cuddle-fucked us into believing that the subversion of the law, the direct defiance of the system of checks and balances, and honest, sincere fork-tounged lying are perfectly acceptable when you’re right and everyone else (including the representatives whom you elected) is wrong.
And you want to compare that to covering up a blow job? Shame on you. Our Republic is fragile, and our nation has more capability to commit great evil than any other. We must regard such violations as reprehensible, or the fate of the very Earth is at risk. I do not appreciate your holding up such actions as justifiable or necessary evils. They were not, and still are not.
Back up a minute, King. Hard though it is to believe, I have not been debating the propiety of the Iran-Contra affair. This whole bit of back-and-forth about the Contras has been in response to the following statement by bungie_us:
I was not addressing the Iran-Contra scandal, because to compare Reagan’s role in that to Clinton’s in the scandal that led to his impeachment is apples and oranges, for one simple reason: Clinton’s crime was proven, while Reagan’s wasn’t. Now, please understand: I’m not so naive as to think that Reagan didn’t know about Iran-Contra. However, the fact remains that as long as his flunkies were protecting him, there’s nothing that could have been done to take it further. If the same level of proof existed between the two (and this is something I said earlier in this thread), I’d gladly say that Reagan’s crime should have led to impeachment. However, if you’re going to include allegations that the President is likely to have engaged in but his role remains unproven, Clinton’s (supposed) crimes go far beyond perjury, witness tampering and obstruction of justice in the Jones/Lewinsky affair: we can start with the slandering of the White House Travel Office employees, continue through the stockpiling of raw FBI files on hundreds of political opponents, and wrap up with bribes to Webb Hubbell for his silence on Whitewater.
Level of proof is a big issue. O.J. is sill a free man because of that, no matter how many people believe he committed double murder. The enormity of the crime does not lessen the burden of proof.
On top of that, I think the reason that support of the Contras was forbidden by Congressional statute was because we didn’t want to get involved in the war down there, not because of the “revulsion” factor.
And this is different from Clinton’s crimes how??? And say what you will for Reagan and the wall of protective flunkies he built around himself, he never tried to invoke his position to save himself from prosecution (an attempt shot down unanimously, not partisanly, by the Supreme Court). That’s a heck of a lot more king-like than Reagan’s behavior was.
First of all, as I said earlier, there is the issue of level of proof. Second of all, this “cover up of a blow job” was an attempt to subvert the justice system and deny an American citizen her rights. Stop minimizing that issue just because sex happens to have been at the core of it.
Bull. We survived a Civil War. How fragile could it be?
Give me a break. Come on, you’re getting hysterical here.
Are you referring to the violations of the law that occurred during Iran-Contra, or his inherent support for the Contras (the thing I’d been defending in the earlier meassages?
I don’t know…comparing the Contras to our founding fathers is pretty disgusting to me. As well as calling Oliver North a national hero and laying flowers on the graves of Nazis while declining to visit the Holocaust graves.
It is vile and disgusting. Reagan is pretty much hated in Central America, I can tell you that. Oscar Arias, former president of Costa Rica says that the US public doesn’t even know the half of what Reagan did.
Actually, the debate over Iran-Contra should be divided into several categories. First, was it wrong to provide arms to the Iranians? Second, was it correct to funnel money from that sale to the Contras, and third, did Reagan know about it?
The first issue is actually difficult. The Iranians that the Reagan administration was dealing with was a new, moderate faction that many felt should be encouraged, lest the Iranians go back to a hardline regime like the Ayatollah’s. Second, while Iran was putatively an enemy of the U.S., Iraq was emerging as the real threat to U.S. interests, and they were enemies of Iran. The U.S. had a lot to lose had Saddam’s forces managed to invade and occupy Iran. As the old saying goes, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” The Middle East is a complex place that does not lend itself to easy black-and-white, good guys-vs-bad guys answers.
As I recall, there was bipartisan support for dealing with the new Iranians, in both the House and the Senate.
The second issue is whether the Contras should have been funded with the proceeds of arms, and I think just about everyone except a few zealots thinks that that was completely wrong. Outside of arguments about whether the Contras were better or worse than the Sandistas, it was completely wrong of administration to bypass the laws of the land and do what they want.
The third issue is whether or not Reagan knew. He certainly knew about the arms sales to Iran. He may have known that the Contras were receiving some help. I don’t know if he knew what Oliver North was really doing, or that there was a direct pipeline of money from Iran to the Contras. He says he didn’t, as does everyone else in his cabinet. I guess you can just choose to disbelieve him because you hate Republicans, but there’s absolutely no evidence I know of that proves that he knew. Also, didn’t he waive his Executive Privilege to allow all of his staff to testify? Nothing came out of those hearings.
What I find hypocritical is that the same Democrats who run around claiming that Clinton was completely innocent in the Whitewater case, the Travelgate case, the Paula Jones affair, etc., because nothing was proven in court, are often the first ones to claim that they KNOW that Reagan was guilty, even though nothing was proven in court.